2023-09-12 00:05:02
ALBERTO KING
Updated Tuesday, September 12, 2023 – 00:05
That the original Sex and the City quartet is expanded transversally is a narrative disaster, but wouldn’t it be worse to have continued to populate the series with rich white women?
WORLD
Reasons to love her
And Just Like That… has been renewed for a third season, so let’s not go now that we don’t see it. The sequel to Sex and the City has been one of the most analyzed, commented and hated series in recent years. And since the views of viewers who only use it as a basis for their witty and cruel comments (you can’t see me, but I’m raising my hand and nodding my head), count the same when counting the total audience, And Just Like That… 1, us 0. What’s more: And Just Like That… 3.
Now, let’s be fair and give Darren Star and Sarah Jessica Parker’s device some merit. The creator of Sex and the City and its protagonist, promoted first to producer and then to semi-television deity, They have done some things well with its sequel. Apart from getting millions of people to see it. Sorry: let’s see her.
In a quite predictable turn of events, a new current of opinion, favorable to And Just Like That… has become strong in recent months. And their arguments are, at the very least, worth taking into account. What if the series wasn’t so bad?
The best and worst series
Faced with the majority hate-contempt for Che (Sara Ramírez), admiration towards his inclusion, as orthopedic as (perhaps for that reason) bravely stubborn, in a series in which he could not hit less. Hey, non-binary and pansexual (I’ve stopped nodding and am making a scared face in case I haven’t used the correct terms), is one of the many windows that And Just Like That… opens to air out her mood. Both she and the three non-white women that complete the female panorama of the series are the perfect excuse for those who immediately talk about “included forzada” in fiction. That the original quartet of Sex and the City is expanded transversally is a narrative disaster, we give that to those who shout “woke dictatorship!”. However… wouldn’t it be worse to have continued to populate the series with rich white women? Since in And Just Like That… Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte do not have any kind of, as Chanel Terrero would say, monetary problem, seeing Che with a normal job and fragile finances builds a small bridge not so much towards the viewer but especially towards the previous series, a frivolous and aspirational fiction, but also, if only timidly, a portrait of the wild economic-labor panorama of a New York that had not yet completed its transformation into a city only for millionaires.
The protagonists of And Just Like That… have happily accompanied the city on that journey and along the way they have lost almost all their grace. Fortunately there is still something left: Seema (Sarita Choudhury), the woman who was desperately searching for her Herms; George (Peter Hermann), Carrie’s date who didn’t know he was married to her partner, or Charlotte coming home drunk, something that, like a good fall in a silly comedy, never fails. We settle for little, yes.
Reasons to hate her
“I hate it” is a very harsh expression that I hear too often in conversations about And Just Like That… We watch it to hate it and we also do it (hate it, not see it) for compelling reasons. Only listing them could exhaust the space of this text. That yes Miranda is stupid now, that if Charlotte is a parody of herself, that if the series ignores Carrie’s meanness, that if she (the series, the character, the star, the three, what do I know) is delirious when she recovers one of the most hateful of their past, that if they send it to another in an unworthy manner. And so on until the expected 3000 characters are filled.
Maybe in the third season they show us a flashback to the day Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) received a blow to the head that made her stupid. Or they consider addressing the issue of Charlotte’s (Kristin Davis) facial touch-ups, as compatible with the character as they are absurd when they respond above all to Davis’s penchant for the most extreme aesthetic medicine. What was once the perfect mix of Lina Morgan and Katie Holmes is now an actress who turns Jim Carrey into a master of restraint. Just as the writers of And Just Like That… are masters of amnesia when they forget how well and how hard pop culture has analyzed Aidan (John Corbett), that boyfriend who wanted to change Carrie until she, when it was all so obvious that it hurt, had ovaries to leave it behind. Turned into a kind of Stockholm syndrome retro-fantasy, Aidan reappeared in the Sex and the City universe in the second of your monstrous films. Her third appearance in And Just Like That… is much less harmless and suggests that in addition to Miranda Carrie has also hit her head. When she is there she wonders if Mr. Big (Chris Noth), her dead husband was “a mistake”, the series cheats on the loner again. In one of her riskiest (and most winning!) bets, Sex and the City opted for Carrie’s Big True Love. Much more questionable than having supported that outdated romantic fantasy at the time is denying it now. The first we can consider stale or hackneyed; the second is narratively insulting. When And Just Like That…, under the pretext of the personal evolution of its protagonists and the social evolution of the world in which it takes place, rants about what made Sex and the City great, its viewers are almost forced to do the same. same with her. Saying “this is not my Sex and the City” is ridiculous. The only thing missing is that a series cannot evolve as its creators decide. Or that such a late sequel cannot be based on a premise as attractive as the relentless passage of time. The years make us wise, but they also sharpen our defects. And, in the most extreme cases, our inability to even recognize them. And Just Like That… is not an interesting mature woman, but rather an old glory to whom we call pretty all the time so as not to argue.
#reasons #love #hate